Why WWE Should Stop Using Hulk Hogan

Hulk Hogan is the wrestling legend who put WWE on the map as a global powerhouse, but his personal misdeeds have severely tarnished his legacy and he shouldn’t return. While the heyday of Hulkamania has long since passed, an argument can still be made that no single performer has had a bigger lasting impact on the world of professional wrestling than Hulk Hogan. Famous for his massive muscles and ability to control a crowd like few others, Hogan carried the then WWF to heights it had never before hit from the mid-1980s to early-1990s.

At that point, WWE seemed ready to move on from The Hulkster, so he stayed relevant by jumping to now defunct competitor WCW, and helping the Ted Turner-owned company to come closer than anyone ever has to toppling Vince McMahon. Hogan became a founding member of the legendary nWo faction, turning evil in the process, and playing against everything he once stood for as a character. Then, after WCW went under, Hogan went back to WWE and was received like a returning hero. Now a two-time inductee – once by himself and once with the nWo – into the WWE Hall of Fame, Hogan remains a wrestling icon. Unfortunately, his legacy has been polluted by the actions of Terry Bollea, the man behind the Hulk Hogan character.

In 2006, a sex tape of Hulk Hogan was secretly recorded without his consent, and in 2012, portions of it leaked online. That was embarrassing to Hogan for a number of reasons, considering his public image, but things got much worse for him when an audio recording of a conversation Hogan had after the sex was made public in 2015. It featured Hogan going off on a long, horrifically racist anti-Black rant, which included many instances of the n-word, and Hogan even explicitly calling himself a racist. Naturally, this led WWE to cut ties with Hogan, but after a few years, they brought him back into the fold in 2018.

But interestingly, WWE fans have greeted his return with a mixed response since. Sometimes he does still receive cheers, but those are commonly mixed with boos, and unfettered booing has also occurred multiple times. Considering that WWE fans practically worshiped Hogan prior to his racist rant, that’s clearly the cause of the backlash against him from the crowd. Things came to a head at this past weekend’s WrestleMania 37 event, which Hogan served as co-host of with Titus O’Neil. Pairing Hogan with O’Neil, a Black man, was already a widely questioned move, and sure enough, every single time Hogan opened his mouth, the crowd greeted him with thunderous booing. Conversely, O’Neil received cheers, so the crowd was definitely against Hogan specifically.

While some would argue that one bad incident shouldn’t mean Hogan has to be shunned forever from WWE, the fact remains that his attempts at publicly apologizing have all been very tepid. One infamous instance of him attempting to apologize privately to his WWE colleagues even essentially boiled down to saying he was sorry he had been recorded. A large portion of WWE’s fanbase clearly hasn’t forgotten Hogan’s racist remarks, or forgiven him for them, and may never do so. That’s illustrated by the fact that Tampa, FL, the site of WrestleMania 37, is Hogan’s home town, yet he still got booed nearly out of the building. Hulkamania is no longer running wild, and WWE needs to stop trotting him out in hopes of playing on nostalgia that doesn’t seem to exist anymore.

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